Sunday perspective on our wonderful species

If we're going to be pointing fingers of blame for the savageness of the 20th Century -- and you know you want to -- raw numbers are probably not enough. There have been plenty of episodes of concentrated brutality that don't show up on the list above simply because the affected population is so small. Meanwhile, a major reason that Russia and China stand so prominently at the top of the list is that they have so many potential victims to begin with. Therefore, I've taken all the episodes of mass killing of the 20th Century and divided them by the population of the country that suffered the losses.

If you look carefully at the chart with the intention of determining which race, religion or ideology has been the most brutal, you'll see a pattern emerge. It's quite a startling pattern, so I'd rather you find it by yourself. Go back and take a second look. I'll meet you at the next paragraph after I explain that, honestly, I did not manipulate the data. I simply took the most likely death toll (military and civilian) among the natives of each country (such as all the South Vietnamese -- ARVN soldiers, civilians and Viet Cong -- who were killed in the Vietnam War), and divided it by the population of that country (prewar). I didn't take, say, only the military dead, or only the victims of genocide. I didn't arbitrarily decide to split one horror into two in order to make each seem smaller (the only borderline case is that I calculated the Russians dead from WW2 and Stalin separately. A judgement call.), or eliminate countries of a certain size. No, I had no predetermined point to prove. I did the math and let the chips fall where they would. (Here are the raw numbers if you want to check behind me.) 

That's why I was so startled to discover that there is absolutely no pattern to the chart. If I had simply picked 25 countries out of a hat, I could not have gotten a more diverse spread than we've got here. We've got rich countries and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small. We've got people of all colors -- white, black, yellow and brown -- widely represented among both the slaughterers and the slaughterees. We've got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Atheists all butchering one another in the name of their various gods or lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we've got political leanings of the left, right and middle; some are monarchies; some are dictatorships and some are even democracies. We've got innocent victims invaded by big, bad neighbors, and we've got plenty of countries who brought it on themselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. Go on -- take a third look. Find any type of country that is not represented among the agents of a major blooding, and probably the only reason for that is that there aren't that many countries in that category to begin with (There are no Hindu or Jewish countries on the chart, but then, there's only one of each on the whole planet, and they're both waiting in the wings among the next 25.). 

In a way, it's rather disheartening to realize that we can't smugly blame the brutality of the century on the Communists, or the imperialists, or the Moslem fundamentalists, or the godless. Every major category of human has done it's share to boost the body count, so replacing, say, Moslem rulers with Christian rulers, or white rulers with black rulers, is not going to change it at all.